The Pirate Queen Read online

  The Pirate Queen

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Copyright

  To Trixie

  Prologue

  In the last hour before she died Maire ni Domnall did what she could to safeguard the future for her only remaining child.

  With accustomed authority she ordered her fellow prisoners, already freezing, out of their shirts and shawls and made them knot the clothes together to form a rope. While they were so employed she took the child to a corner.

  ‘Tell me who you are.’

  The recital of ancestry took some minutes.

  Maire nodded: ‘Remember it. Tell me where the treasure is. Softly.’

  Whispering, the child gave a location and its cross-bearings.

  Maire nodded. ‘Remember it.’

  ‘But I should much prefer to stay and die with you, Mother. Please.’

  Maire smacked the small hands reaching for her. ‘Selfishness, selfishness. Now then, to go back through Munster is impossible.’ The child’s chance of escape was slight enough as it was, but in the desert the English had made of Munster there would be no chance at all. ‘Head for the port and find a ship, preferably one making for the west, but you may have little choice. Pay for your passage with this.’ She had managed to conceal her royal gold torque from her captors. She would have bribed them with it to save her life, but she had watched another prisoner try to bargain for his life with a silver box, and the English had said it was stolen and taken it from him and strung him up just the same. She tucked the gold necklet into the child’s jerkin, which she buttoned with care.

  ‘Now then. Before we get you through, I shall start screaming. It is to attract the guards; you must not think I am afraid.’

  For the first time Maire was lying and the child knew it; the last thread of their life unravelled itself and joined the maniacal abnormality which had entangled them. The small face, which had been stiff with terror and courage, began to unlimn. Watching it, Maire nearly gave way herself. She considered whether it was better for them to die together instead of sending the child to face God knew what alone. No, it was not. She tried to think of some last piety with which to give an assurance of the ultimate goodness of God and the unfailing care of the Holy Mother, but she would not lie to the child again. ‘Survive,’ was all she said.

  The watchtower was not a prison and the people had only been kept in it so that the English soldiers, exhausted by hanging so many men, women and children the day before, could have a night’s rest before hanging the rest. Nevertheless, its three floors had only arrow slits for windows and even these had a bar newly cemented in the niche before them. With the dagger from her boot Maire had dislodged two stones from the more ancient cement of the slit, and thanked her God that her child had the narrow head and shoulders of their clan.

  She placed the rope between the child’s hands and put the rest of it between its legs. ‘Like shinning down from the yardarm,’ she instructed. ‘Hang on very tight.’ She hauled herself up by the bar and looked out. Sixty feet below a conscientious sentry was pacing out his patrol on this side of the tower, occasionally glancing up. She began to scream. It was easy; stopping would be difficult.

  She saw the sentry’s head look up towards her. He might not move; he’d heard too many screaming women. But the sound issuing from her mouth released the other prisoners from their hopelessness into the luxury of panic. At once the tower vibrated with terror as if its floors were stacked canteens of beans which whistled in the agitation of boiling.

  The sentry began to run towards the steps to the tower door. There was no more time. Maire lifted the child up, forcing its head between the bar and the wall, twisting the seven-year-old body so that the shoulders were presented sideways for the slit. It was difficult to pass the rope beyond the obstruction of the child so that it hung outside, but it was done in time. She glimpsed the face in the moonlight, blood from the small nose running into its mouth. ‘Hold very tight, darling.’ The endearment nearly undid them both; the child clung, unable to leave her. Maire snarled: ‘Survive, didn’t I tell you?’ The rope swayed as the child slid down the drop that was out of Maire’s sight. Doors banged on the lower floors, men shouted above the noise, screams of pain mingled with the hysteria.

  A woman clawed at Maire’s arm. ‘My son too.’

  Maire looked down at the boy being held up to her. A typical Munster peasant with a large head. The struggle to get him through would outlast the arrival of the soldiers and tell them where her own child had gone so that they began a pursuit too soon. She nodded. ‘In a second.’

  There were footfalls on the stairs. Maire felt the rope go slack, saw a tiny shape streak across the yard to the shadow of a cannon mounting, pause and slip over the edge of the hill. She got out her knife and sliced through the knot round the bar so that the rope slithered down to lie unseen at the foot of the tower. She lifted the knife in case the Munster mother should attack her, but there was no fight in the woman. She collapsed, sobbing.

  The door opened and soldiers hurled themselves into the room, clubbing and bludgeoning. ‘Should I cut my throat now, I wonder,’ asked Maire of herself, ‘and save the indignity?’ But God, if there was a God, was antipathetic to suicide, and having to spend eternity among the inferior classes who inhabited hell was surely the greater indignity.

  The English began hanging the prisoners that night, in case the hysteria developed into a break-out. As she waited in line for the gallows, freed from the burden of her child, Maire had time to be angry, and she asked the man in front of her, who spoke English, if he knew why she was being hanged.

  ‘For being a witch, it was said in court,’ said the man, absently.

  ‘What does that mean?’ asked Maire, who did not recognise the term.

  The English-speaker said it meant that somebody had named her as a dangerous woman in order to save themselves from being hanged. ‘But I know no one in this area,’ protested Maire, as she had protested in untranslated shouts at the mass trial.

  The English-speaker shrugged at her as he went up the steps. ‘Merely being Irish is enough to hang the lot of us,’ he said.

  So Maire went to the gallows for a crime of which she was not only guiltless but ignorant. She went furiously, but anonymously. The English had trouble keeping count of their victims, let alone taking their names.

  Nevertheless, some six years later, Maire ni Domnall’s death came to the attention of Elizabeth I, Queen of England.

  Chapter One

  An old man, undistinguished except for the chain of office round his neck, shuffled through the petitioners in the gallery who babbled at
him but knew better than to pluck his sleeve. ‘My lord, will you remind her… ?’ ‘My lord, I’ve been waiting…’

  He might have been deaf. Actually his hearing was going a bit, like his eyesight. It wasn’t until he was close to the door to the queen’s chamber that he noticed his way was impeded by the Captain of the Guard, six feet of stylised steel armour.

  ‘Who approaches the presence of Her Majesty?’ Procedurally the captain was correct in his challenge, but he knew very well who the old man was. Walter Raleigh liked playing dangerous games. He’d caught the queen’s eye by playing them.

  In a sudden silence the petitioners saw the old man pause as if he were confused by the question. Actually he was sympathising with the predicament of this impudent young man and all such young men he had seen come and go over the years. Audacity was what attracted the queen’s favour to them in the first place, but that same audacity inevitably broke them. They never knew when to stop. Had he the energy, he would lecture this one. ‘Take heed,’ he would say to him, ‘it is grey men who survive to become old in this court, the cautious, the dependable, the ones she works to death, which is better than death on the block.’ But he did not care enough to say it.

  What he did say, mildly, was: ‘The Lord Treasurer, summoned by Her Majesty.’

  ‘Pass, my Lord Treasurer.’

  Through the doors, through the chamber which separated the gallery from the sanctum and in which the courtiers lounged when off duty, through the inner doors and into the scent which dominated any room she was in nowadays, an Arabic concoction that Hatton had procured for her saying it was the same perfume used by the Queen of Sheba while visiting Solomon, or some such nonsense.

  As he bowed – he was excused from kneeling because of his arthritis – he squinted to see who was with her. Black Tom. Deary, deary me, that meant Ireland. He didn’t feel up to Ireland this morning. He bowed again: ‘My lord Earl of Ormond.’

  ‘My Lord Treasurer.’

  Her voice whipped away the niceties. ‘The slave, Burghley.’

  Her long fingers belonged to the vegetable kingdom, white and elongated as asparagus tips. She kept them still, like her eyes. In someone so animated it was unnerving, deliberately, but Burghley knew every trick in her armoury. Somewhere in his own body, bent at the neck and shoulders as though the chain round them incorporated the weight of its office, there was love for her, if she hadn’t exhausted his desire to find it. But the use of ‘Burghley’ was serious. On good days he was her Spirit. Slave?

  ‘Master Raleigh’s man. Six years ago. You hanged him.’

  He remembered. ‘I didn’t hang him, Phoenix.’ (Phoenix was the favoured address this season.) ‘I recall the poor thing died in Ireland in some over-zealous executions during the Desmond Wars.’

  ‘Indeed. It appears that at the time they were zealously hanging other people’s slaves, they also hanged a subject who could have been of use to us.’ She cocked her wigged head towards the Earl of Ormond. ‘Now that the Lord Treasurer has joined us, you may recount the details.’

  As usual she was sharply delineated; hard jewels, starched ruff, pointed stomacher, angular farthingale which today supported a skirt of lemon and green, an acidic shock against the restrained richness of the arras behind her. The older she became and the more intransigent her problems, the more her appearance reassured the public by its decisiveness. It was camouflage to obscure a mind which pondered great decisions with the swiftness of a turtle presented with too many lettuce leaves.

  The man who stepped forward, Thomas Butler, 10th Earl of Ormond, was a relief in soft black velvet, with his creamy skin a contrast where it appeared through his dark hair and beard. Nevertheless there was a resemblance between himself and the queen, the same light-blue protuberant eyes, the same shape of face, similar freckles. Three generations back, a Boleyn had married a Butler and provided a mutual ancestor for the two of them. They took pleasure in their cousinship, Elizabeth as much as Black Tom. Though she boasted in public of being her father’s daughter, she clung in private to the line of Anne Boleyn. ‘My black husband’ she called Ormond, one of those endearments of hers which caused the gossip she delighted in. She loved speculation about her sexuality. Privately, Burghley thought, when he thought about it at all, she was a tease. Her hymen was probably as intact as it ever had been, though withering now.

  He didn’t mind what their relationship was as long as it kept her happy; the Ormonds were Protestant and the only earls of Ireland who had shown consistent loyalty to the English Crown.

  ‘It is a peculiar matter we have here, my lord,’ said the earl, ‘and one concerning a Connaught sept, the O’Flaherties. Would you know of them?’ Despite a perfect English accent, he had the cadence of an Irishman.

  ‘Is it their name up on the gates of Galway?’ asked Burghley. ‘“From the wrath of the O’Flaherties Good Lord deliver us?”’

  Out of the corner of his vision he saw Elizabeth’s lashless eyes glaze intentionally. She resented her Lord Treasurer’s mastery of Irish genealogy because her own was sketchy; she flinched from the subject of Ireland and affected boredom with it.

  She walked away from them to look out of the great window which was allowing the morning light through in diamond shapes onto the floor.

  ‘The same. Nor has God always delivered Galway from them. A barbaric people. Well now. Some six years ago the tanaist of the O’Flaherties lost his wife.’

  ‘She didn’t die, Burghley,’ called Elizabeth from the window. ‘He lost her. Such carelessness.’

  ‘They quarrelled,’ went on Black Tom, nodding, ‘and the lady left him, taking their two sons and a daughter with her. The O’Flaherty assumed she’d gone back to her own clan.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘The O’Connors.’

  Burghley pulled his fingers through his beard. The O’Connors were, or certainly had been, the royal clan of Connaught and in a past age had styled themselves Kings of Ireland.

  ‘The O’Flaherty intended to fetch her back when it was convenient to him, the next time he raided O’Connor land.’

  The long foot of the present Queen of Ireland could be heard tapping on the floor in irritation at the anarchy of her most westerly subjects.

  ‘When he did, however,’ continued Black Tom, ‘it was to find that she wasn’t there at all, but had taken a ship for Spain.’

  With the naming of their vast enemy, an element entered which, by its mass, momentarily altered the room’s perspective, looming over the occupants so that they seemed insubstantial and puny, like twigs swirling in a gale. Even the outburst ‘Treachery!’ from the woman by the window was a bat’s squeak.

  ‘Treachery in our sense, ma’am,’ the Earl of Ormond said smoothly, ‘but not in theirs. These people are not concerned with our quarrel; they trade with Spain, they’d trade for sulphur with the Devil. After a time the O’Flaherty decided on a search, though not so much for his wife as his children. All ships bound from his lands to Spain were ordered to enquire for them, your man even went himself but no trace could he discover. He spent another year in anger, thinking the woman had holed up with some lover out of his reach, though in the meantime he himself had taken another wife.’

  There was a snort from the window. ‘Barbarians.’

  ‘Then it occurred to him that he should not be so much shamed as concerned that some mischance might have overtaken her and the little ones. It was then that he came to me.’ The earl’s eyes flickered towards his cousin and he muttered to Burghley: ‘There is a distant kinship between us.’

  Burghley nodded. Through what he regarded as the pernicious Irish custom of gossipry, everybody in Ireland was related in some way to everybody else. It once again occurred to him, though he did not point it out, that, through her mother, the Queen of England’s veins quite probably shared the same blood as those very clans she despised. Black Tom didn’t point it out either.

  The aftermath of the Desmond Wars had not provided a helpful enviro
nment in which to search for missing persons. Over half of Munster was missing. Some families had run away to escape the war between English authority and the rebel Irish lords, led by the Earl of Desmond, which had lain their country waste; thousands had died of starvation; other thousands had been killed, sometimes by other Irish, most often by the English who had hit on the idea of subduing Munster by depopulating it entirely.

  The story of Black Tom’s search for the runaway O’Flaherty wife looked like being a long one, and Burghley asked Elizabeth’s permission to sit down while it was told. Sometimes she was solicitous for him, but not today. However, he took her sigh as assent and found a chair. His gout was giving him gyp.

  Ormond had prosecuted the search through his agents on the Continent and in Ireland, ‘having little time myself’, but Burghley found himself wondering why such a great earl had prosecuted it all. It would have been more to oblige the Ormonds than the O’Flaherties, he was sure of that. The Lord Treasurer began leafing through that section of his mind which held his knowledge of the west of Ireland and its clans.

  ‘…and then it was discovered,’ he heard Ormond say, ‘that a cog such as is sometimes used by the western clans had been wrecked on a remote part of the Dingle peninsula many years before and that a lady, a child and a sailor had been its only survivors.’

  At this point, Ormond said, he had lost heart. The Dingle people adhered, like most of the western coast dwellers, to the time-honoured custom of slaughtering shipwrecked persons who came ashore, in order to claim the wreck for themselves.

  ‘But one of my agents happening to be in Cork came across an English settler belonging to the city who had a tale to tell going back to that time. I had him brought to me.’

  What the Cork settler had told Ormond was that six years previously he had gone out of that city to witness a mass hanging of rounded-up Irish near a watchtower just along the coast. He’d enjoyed seeing the rebels die, he told Ormond, so that even though some of the hangings took place at night he had stayed there, eating the provisions his wife had packed for him, and watching the entertainment by the light of flares.